Tag Archives: eBay

It’s the holiday season.The people I overheard at the bus stop the other day were discussing shopping on the bus.It can be a long trip from here, and evening traffic out of New York (ironically) is quite heavy this time of year.Bored commuters, sitting on the bus with their phones, shop.I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only one with the overhead light on during the fully dark ride home this week.At one point the driver seemed to think it was a mistake on my part and snapped it off.I carry a book light with me for just such eventualities, but I had that odd feeling one gets when everyone else got the memo but you didn’t.In any case, I was reading a physical book, not shopping.

Then I read about a book I need for my research.Problem is, I don’t have an institution, or a wealthy sponsor, so I often buy books used.Back in my teaching days Amazon was new, and the idea of buying books online foreign and unfamiliar.Now you can’t find a bookstore when you want one.In any case, this particular book was on offer on eBay.Now, I haven’t used eBay for quite a while.I never think of it as a place to find reading material, but there it was.Who would’ve thought research would ever lead in this direction?The price was reasonable, so I signed in as a guest and placed my order.With out of print books like this you run the risk of price-gouging or sudden unavailability—the independent researcher’s nightmare.

When the confirmation page came up, I couldn’t help but notice that the header was in Russian.I wondered if Trump’s dream had really finally come true, or if the eBay on which I ordered an out-of-print book was really a trap.How do you find out?Who do you tell when your current government is completely at the beck and call of the Russian government?I was in a brown study for a while.The book, used, on Amazon was listed at over a thousand dollars, and this for a paperback published in 2009.People will pay quite a lot for certain books, even if they don’t retain their resale value.Ideas, it seems, are worth more than money.But we no longer have a government to protect our interests.Not even research, it seems, is safe any more.

Religion is one of those words that defies easy definition. As I’ve suggested before, you know it when you see it, but trying to pin the idea down is a different matter. Consequently, religion is closely related to a number of other areas of interest: philosophy, ethics, monsters, and the paranormal, to name a few. I was interested, therefore to see a blog post recently concerning a “haunted Bible.” Call me naive, but the thought had never occurred to me before: could a holy book be haunted? Churches are notorious for housing ghosts, of course. As someone who’s spent overnight retreats in churches I can vouch for the fact that a sanctuary after dark is a naturally eerie place. I’ve never seen a ghost in a church, however, and I’m not entirely convinced they exist, and if they do, what they might be. In any case, a haunted Bible is a different story.

David Weatherly is a fairly well-known paranormal writer. My web search brought up his blog where he explains that the haunted Bible was for sale on eBay with an asking price of $180,000. The owner, who remains anonymous, claimed to take no responsibility for any damage the supernatural scripture might cause. Instead of thinking that we have here a genuine haunted leather scripture, I know it can be nothing other than a genuine hoax (not on Weatherly’s part). Realtors know well that a haunting can, in today’s climate, counterintuitively drive the price of a house up. With people hungry for some element of the supernatural in their lives, and ghost hunters of all sorts on their televisions, they are willing to shell out a few more dollars to have a spirit around. And since ghosts can’t sign contracts, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be there once you move in. The supernatural can, it turns out, be the perfect scam.

If items can be haunted, I suppose a Bible might as well. When an owner, however, turns down an offer of 50,000 pounds that odor you’re smelling is that of a rat. I love old books. I have a few around that have more than a century’s weight on them. Looking at used bookstores longingly, I see first editions of Poe or Shakespeare that sell for far less than the asking price of the most printed book in the western world. Bibles, if you know where to look, can be had for free. I’ve got at least a dozen of them myself. Nothing makes fakery quite so clear as greed. No wonder the haunted Bible was such a disconnect. There’s nothing paranormal about love of money. That’s all too normal for anyone who tries to sell a Bible for implied spirituality.